


forgetting the words to your favorite song

by TheJGatsby



Series: potentially lovely perpetually human [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, F/M, a lot of fudging the details of the star wars universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 03:06:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6312871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sits here with Ben Solo’s childhood set out before her, trying to do the same thing, trying to construct in her mind the boy he’d been, how he’d become the man he is.<br/>Of course she’s sentimental. He turns the doll over in his hands again.<br/>(Or, finding pieces of each other)</p>
            </blockquote>





	forgetting the words to your favorite song

**Author's Note:**

> um. Well. pain? Pain. Sorry.  
> Title from Eet by Regina Spektor

 

Rey spends a lot of time on the Falcon, so she feels confident making the assertion that she’s very familiar with it. It took some doing, because it’s a big ship, and it’s complicated, and it’s nothing like its blueprints because Han Solo was a scatter-brained kind of guy who just threw modifications and changes on willy-nilly, but by now she’d say she knows it pretty well inside and out. She’s figured out most of its weird little quirks, the places where Han used to hide things, the places where Chewie still  _ does _ hide things. She knows the particular tilt you have to give some of the levers when you throw them, which switches are mislabeled, how to twist the cables together when she finishes fiddling with the hyperdrive, and she’s starting to map out exactly what most of the mystery wires do (a lot of them don’t do anything at all anymore).

So it’s a surprise to her when she finds the little hidden compartment in the bunkroom, low in the corner, almost too small for anyone bigger than a ten-year-old to reach. Years of cramming into tight spaces as a scavenger pay off, though, and she manages to fish out a small metal box with BEN painted across the top in bright blue letters.

For a long time she just sits there and stares at it, struggling to imagine the towering, formidable man she fought on Starkiller as a boy, small and gangly, scrawling his name carefully across the top of this box. Eventually she reaches for the latches on it, and with careful hands opens it up. It’s filled with the random detritus of a childhood she’d never experienced, toys and knickknacks and an old datapad with scratches along the sides like it’d been dropped one too many times. She sets the datapad aside and picks through the rest of it, pulls out the X-wing with most of the paint scraped and rubbed off, an obvious favorite, and the rough, unremarkable rock that’s been broken open to reveal clear purple crystals inside.

When she was a scavenger, she used to wonder at the things she found- Dosmit Raeh’s helmet, the scraps of burnt clothing in shipwrecks, all the random bits of life that gave an identity to the hollow metal she stripped and salvaged to survive. She’d make up stories about the people who’d flown those ships, manned those walkers, worn those uniforms. Now she sits here with Ben Solo’s childhood set out before her, trying to do the same thing, trying to construct in her mind the boy he’d been, how he’d become the man he is.

It’s hard, and she finds herself going in circles on the fact that he had thrown away his family for something she still didn’t understand. So she packs everything back into the box, except the geode and the datapad, and boots it up. It takes a minute, because it’s been in a box for so long, but then she’s on a bright opening screen with big icons, simple and childish and completely unlike the ones she’s used in the Resistance. She finds an archive of images and starts there.

  
  


Kylo knew she was from Jakku. He’d just chosen to pretend he didn’t when he decided to hide there for a while. It was just a convenient planet in the outer rim without much in the way of population or traffic, mostly just small outposts and a whole lot of sand. Logistically, it was a good, safe choice, and a reasonable place to lay low. The fact that the scavenger had grown up there meant nothing to him, and in light of the feelings he’d finally admitted he has for her, it meant even less. If nothing else Kylo is a creature of denial, through and through, and that’s what brings him to bargain and sweet-talk his way onto a spice transport bound for Jakku when he starts getting strange looks in the cantina in Mos Eisley a few weeks after the debacle in the Hutt’s palace, deliberately ignoring an easier opportunity that would have taken him to the other side of the galaxy.

When he lands in Cratertown, he can taste her in the Force on this planet, almost as if she were there, but it’s a different sort of feeling- stale, but somehow deeper. She’s woven into the breathing life of this place, what little there is. She’s as much a part of it as the dunes and the rocks and everyone else who lived and died in the cruel, endless desert. It takes a little more cleverness and strong-arming to acquire a sand-speeder.

“What’s that way?” he asks its previous owner, pointing in the direction he can feel her former presence most strongly.

“Not a lot. The sinking sands. Niima outpost. A whole lot of desert.”

“Niima outpost?”

“Hmm, yeah, about half a day’s ride on the piece of shit you just bought. Careful of the sun, though, you’re a pale bastard. Just keep going straight that way, you’ll find it.”

He doesn’t make it to Niima. He sees it glimmering on the horizon at one point, but by then he can feel the tether of the scavenger’s life here tugging at him, fixed somewhere behind his ribs like the string of fate, and he turns and keeps going, feeling it get stronger and more insistent until he’s sitting in front of a rusted, hollowed-out old AT-AT, half-buried in the sand.

He’s almost too big to fit into it, his broad shoulders scraping at the sides of the open hatch as he crawls inside, and he knows that even she had to have felt cramped in this tiny space, cluttered as it is with the necessities of survival and a veritable junkyard of bits and pieces. He sits back, folded up as small as he can be, and takes the space in.

  
  


The first archive she scrolls through is all pictures- a child’s drawings. They’re very bad at first, but progressively they start to resemble actual people and creatures. There’s hundreds, and she files that away in her head-  _ he liked to draw _ . She wonders if he still does, if destruction and wickedness leaves time for art. Somehow she doubts it, and feels a twinge of disappointment- he was talented, he could have been good at it if he’d had the chance to keep it up.

After that, she finds the holos. There’s fewer of them, and they’re mostly of his family, brief moments captured by an unskilled cameraman. Han and Leia, laughing together with Ben between them making faces. A lot of scenery, different planets and biomes and cities. A younger Luke, clean-shaven and bright-eyed, holding his lightsaber. It’s surreal, in a way, and she aches a little bit behind her heart, because they all look so  _ happy _ , and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen any of them smiling like that.

Then she finds the holovids.

The first one is of a Ben who looks about eight or nine, and he’s standing next to an open doorway with clear plastic stretched across it a few feet up. The vid starts with him giggling almost uncontrollably.

“Poe, are you filming?” he asks, and Rey hears a much younger Poe respond in the affirmative. “Okay. Ready?”

“Ready,” Poe says.

Ben draws a fist back and pounds it against the wall, hard, then shouts “ _ Dad! _ ” at the top of his lungs, doing his best impression of injury. A second later there’s the sound of approaching footsteps, and then Han appears onscreen just in time to duck under the plastic stretched across the doorframe. Ben and Poe groan in disappointed unison.

“Come on, kid, did you really think I was gonna fall for that?” Han asks, and then the vid switches off.

Most of the holovids are like that, the kind of things a little boy is interested in, a lot of him and Poe doing stupid, reckless things and trying to finally get the better of Han with a lot of very obvious pranks. They never succeed.

Then she stumbles across a more hidden archive, labeled something innocuous that would make anyone else scroll past it, but doesn’t escape her scavenger habit of looking everywhere in the hopes of finding some deeply-hidden gem. The holovids inside of it… she understands why he hid them. He’s dim and frightened, as if they were filmed in the middle of the night, and in some of them he’s crying. Most of them start with “I had another nightmare tonight,” but as they progress, as he gets older, they start to change. “I’m hearing things again. Dad doesn’t believe me.” “The voice keeps telling me Poe’s not really my friend.” “I can’t remember anything I did today, it’s like I wasn’t the one living in my body.”

“I’m scared,” he says in every single one, the thread tying them all together, and she wishes there were a word for the cold, sick horror sitting deep in her stomach. “I’m really scared.”

And then there’s the last holovid. He’s sitting in the same room she is now, cross-legged on the bunk, holding the same geode she is, turning it over and over in his hands.

“They’re sending me away,” he says, quietly. “Mom says that Uncle Luke is going to teach me how to be a Jedi. I don’t know if I want to be a Jedi.” He stares at the rock for a moment, and she can see his thin little shoulders draw into a tense line. “I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to live with Uncle Luke, but Mom says it’s not a choice I get to make. I want to stay with her and Poe and Chewie and- I don’t know why I have to go.” He swipes at his cheek with one hand and keeps his eyes fixed on his fingers, twisting and turning the geode anxiously. “ _ He _ keeps telling me it’s cause they don’t want me anymore.” There’s a muffled knock on the door, a voice Rey can’t quite hear, and his hands tighten into fists, his face twisting into something hurt and angry. “Go away!” he snaps, and in his snarl she sees the echo of Kylo Ren, the seed of all that hate, and she wonders who was on the other side of the door. The holovid ends, and Rey feels miles further from understanding her enemy than she ever has.

  
  


There’s a little doll on the shelf, dressed in scraps of orange to look like a pilot. Kylo turns it over and over in his hands, slowly, taking in every detail. It’s roughly handmade, and he can almost see a very small scavenger piecing it together from garbage, clutching it tightly to her chest as she sleeps. It’s a sweet image, twisted into something achingly sad. He doesn’t know how young she was when she came to Jakku, but the doll makes him not want to find out.

Next to where the doll was, there’s also a flower, a hardy desert variety, wilted nearly to death with its carer’s long absence. Kylo searches around for a water container and pours enough into the plant’s little pot to completely soak the dirt. He has to smile as he looks down at the half-empty canteen, thinking about the girl, skinny and half-starved, giving up some of the precious little water she has to keep the flower alive, for no real reason other than just to have something pretty in her home, to take care of something other than herself.

The little cook-stove has some kind of rodent living in it, and it scuttles past him when he accidentally kicks at its home. Every inch of this place has a piece of her stamped into it- she’s tough and enduring like the shell she lives in and the half-made leather boots sitting on the shelf, and he knew that, but she’s also unexpectedly soft.  _ Sentimental _ , says a part of his mind, and rather than the disgust he once would have conjured at the idea, he feels something warm in his chest. Of course she’s sentimental. He turns the doll over in his hands again. She’s a maker, a fixer, someone who takes things and improves them, builds something new and better out of them. Creation flows from her hands, and he’s in awe of it. Kylo can’t remember the last time his own hands did anything other than kill and destroy.

He puts the doll, carefully, back on the shelf.

When he turns his head, he notices the marks on the wall for the first time. Thousands of them, stretching across the rusted metal and up towards the ceiling, and he reaches out slowly to touch them, pressing his fingers into the uneven grooves, and he can  _ see _ her as clearly as if she were in front of him, a tiny girl of no more than six reaching up as high as she can to make what looks like the thirtieth mark, and then she’s older, terrifyingly thin and tired, and her gaunt hand shakes as she scratches a shallow mark into the wall halfway down, and when he blinks she’s right next to him, fierce and strong like he knows her, making her mark hurriedly before turning towards the shelf.

He blinks rapidly, and the image disappears, but he becomes aware of the creeping feeling of immense loneliness, and he looks back at the wall and all the marks, days upon months upon years of her alone in this barren, unforgiving land. He’s so sad, suddenly, he can barely breathe for it, knowing how  _ alone _ she’d been, for so long, and he remembers the fury she’d leveled at him all that time ago on Tattooine, shouting about his family, and he wanted to hit himself for saying she didn’t understand, because, stars, she understood better than he ever would. For all his demons, he’d had people who  _ loved _ him, cared for him, nurtured him- had anyone looked after her? Ever? Or had it always been like this, empty desert nights and a makeshift ragdoll, walking the knife’s edge of starvation? Kylo almost wants to cry for it, and for all his years and his cynicism and his arrogance, he doesn’t know how to begin understanding her, this incredible, indomitable girl, everything she is despite the universe fighting to smother her.

He runs his fingers over the marks again and hopes fervently that, wherever she is, she’s not lonely anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


End file.
